Hugh Delehanty

My Life, Examined

Hemingway wrote that there’s a world of difference between stalking a lion on foot than in a car. That’s why I was intrigued when I heard about life coach Richard Leider’s walking safaris in Tanzania. Unlike Hemingway, however, Leider isn’t interested in downing lions, but in showing people how to hunt the big game within themselves. Leider began these three-week “inventures,” as he calls them, in 1983 after falling in love with Africa on an Outward Bound trek to Mount …

When I hear financial pundits counsel unemployed people over 50 to start a business if they can’t find a job, I think of the last time I tried to go entrepreneurial. This was not an experience for the faint of heart. The idea sounded good at the time. I was in my early 30s and the magazine I’d been editing had just folded. The last thing I wanted to do was sign up for another intense 9-to-5 job. So when …

I live in a city where it’s still O.K. to look dowdy, especially if you’re a man. In fact, you can go places in Washington with a good head of grey hair and the Brooks Brothers sport jacket you wore in high school. Sometimes, if you also have a boyish glint in your eye, you can even get the top job in town (see: Clinton, William Jefferson). So I was thrown off guard a few weeks ago when Tommy, a …

You probably remember the scene. Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, is obsessing about the fact that his new girlfriend, Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), doesn’t like to have sex without smoking a joint first. So he goes for a walk and interrogates strangers about their sex lives, including a nebbishy-looking old man. Alvy: With your wife in bed, does she need some kind of artificial stimulation, like, like marijuana? Old man: We use a large vibrating egg. It’s a funny …

It was a funny wedding. Several guests got locked in the bathroom. My brother-in-law picked a fight with the wedding manager. And while we were getting ready to leave, someone made off with the leftovers, including a whole 10 lb. salmon, roasted with dill sauce. What I remember most, however, was the reading. When my wife, Barbara, and I were planning the wedding, the only thing I insisted on was that the minister read a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters …

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been building my bucket list. It sounds weird, but it’s true. I remember in the sixth grade creating a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish in life. At the top of the list was “play second base for the Dodgers.” That one didn’t happen, but a lot of the others did. I became a writer (#2); I traveled to Ireland (#4); I lost my virginity (#7)–to name a few. Friends …